Report Finds Less Misuse of Painkillers by Teenagers

A new federal report suggests that misuse of prescription painkillers among teenagers is decreasing, news that heartened officials who remained concerned at the steady numbers regarding marijuana and e-cigarette use.

The percentage of 12th graders who said they had used narcotics other than heroin — generally prescription opioids such as Vicodin and OxyContin — decreased to 5.4 percent from a high of 9.5 percent in the 2004 report. Addiction to the medications has been particularly worrisome because it can lead to heroin abuse, widely considered a continuing epidemic.

Several experts ascribed the decrease to growing understanding of the dangers of painkillers among both young people and prescribers. Significantly fewer students said the pills were easy to obtain, suggesting that doctors were prescribing more cautiously and adults were keeping medications in locations more secure than medicine cabinets.

“I think it’s a recognition that these medications are not benign, and also the education and prevention efforts in teenagers,” said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which issued the report. The survey, conducted by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, asked 45,000 total students in eighth, 10th and 12th grades about the use of and attitudes about dozens of substances.

Alcohol data was encouraging as well, Dr. Volkow said in a telephone interview. Although 40 percent of respondents said they had used alcohol in the past year, including 22.5 percent to the point of getting drunk, those were significant decreases from 52 percent and 31 percent one decade ago.

Dr. Volkow and others were displeased, however, by what appeared to be a lack of progress in areas related to smoking.

For the first time in the survey’s 41 years, the percentage of high school seniors who said they smoked marijuana daily (which remained steady at 6 percent) exceeded those who smoked traditional cigarettes daily (5.5 percent, a large drop from last year’s 6.7). Although this derived mostly from the continued decrease in cigarette smoking since the 1970s, many students appear to be transitioning to e-cigarettes, which are unregulated and can contain nicotine and other harmful products, Dr. Volkow said.

About 24 percent of all students said they had smoked marijuana in the past year, virtually unchanged from 10 years ago. But that number could soon rise, because vastly fewer young people said daily marijuana use was harmful: Whereas 58 percent said so in 2005, only 32 percent did this year.

“As more states legalize medical marijuana, there are more and more arguments for legalization,” said Lloyd Johnston, who has overseen the study at Michigan since its inception in 1975. “While those might be happening in a particular state each time, it’s really a national story, and kids hear about it.”

The results of one survey question suggested that many young people were still unaware about the dangers of smoking. When asked whether it was harmful to smoke more than a pack of cigarettes a day, one quarter of respondents said it was not.

“There is an attitude of questioning information brought up by the government, and among teenagers that can be more than among adults,” Dr. Volkow said. “It’s a constant fight — with all drugs.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Report Finds Less Misuse of Painkillers by Teenagers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe